Archive for July, 2010

Followed by a 2k treadmill run by way of a cool down (yes, the most ineffective cool down possible as mentioned before). The row was a moderate to hard intensity. The first 4k was fast enough to know you’re working pretty hard, but slow enough to know you can speed up sufficiently at the end without pushing too hard.

I’m glad it’s the weekend again. I am a member of two gyms – a fairly basic one at work that has the necessary equipment and a small changing room with a shower, and a posh commercial gym with a pool and all the nice things that come with an expensive commercial gym. I rarely get the time for a more relaxed session during the week, and generally am rushed to fit in a short session in the work gym just down the corridor from my office. Trying to change, workout, cooldown, shower, change and get back to the office within about an hour is not always easy, and certainly doesn’t leave time for any non essential activities (like warming up properly, actually cooling down at all, stretching…. So the weekend training sessions are always ones to look forward to.

I had a busy day at work ahead of me with a meeting through the middle of the day when I would otherwise go to the gym. What would a normal person do, take a rest day? What did I do? I put my road bike in the back of the car, then rather than drop my wife at work and drive the further 9 miles to my work I parked there, took the bike out of the car, and cycled the 9miles in to work. I put my garmin Edge 305 bike computer on, and it wasn’t a fast ride for only the second time my road bike has been on the road in 2010. To be fair though there was 250ft of ascent in the first 1.5miles of the ride, which both hits the average speed, and your legs when they’re not used to cycling! The ride back was a slightly different routine for variety and although that route didn’t have such a big sustained climb, it had nearly double the total ascent throughout the route.

Official news today:

I mentioned the news a couple of weeks ago about an erg athlete testing positive for EPO. Today it has been officially announced in the cycling press by British Cycling. Team Oarsome rower Dan Staite has been banned for 2 years following a positive test for both EPO and an aromatase inhibitor.

What are your thoughts on what the erging world’s reaction should be to this? Dan has been a prominent member of one of the top indoor rowing clubs for a number of years, and holds a number of middle to long distance erging world records. Is the use of performance enhancing drugs assumed to be illegal in indoor rowing competition, even though there is no governing body or official rules governing this (that I know of)? Should it be assumed that this was a one off use of PEDs and they didn’t influence any of his erging performances? Whatever the case it is a shame that someone many of us thought was a uniquely talented athlete was perhaps not the endurance monster we thought. At least the one time I raced him head to head in a 5k race I won (by about 2 seconds setting a new pb).

Continuing the momentum of regular 2k trials today aiming to improve on the 6:28 from last week. The plan today was to break 6:26 with pacing of 5 hard strokes, settle to 1:37 / 1:38 through the middle, speed up in the final 500m. I also wanted to deliberately keep the stroke rate higher to make it easier to increase pace in the last 500m. Here’s how it went:

Perfectly to plan. Next time the aim will have to be to keep the pace a bit faster through the middle with a goal of breaking 6:24. Ideally I’d like to get this progression down to under 6:20 before regular speed interval work starts again in the run up to BIRC.

Even after a pretty hard 2k trial I still put in the treadmill run afterwards with a 1750m today (so pushing over the mile now).

Followed by the now regular short treadmill run, this time 1250m. I’m not sure how much benefit these short treadmill runs are having, but if nothing else it is currently between 5 and 8mins of extra exercise on each session, which can’t hurt. The longer run I did on Sunday had no after effects at all, not a single muscle feeling tired the next day, so I think the short runs are helping. Eventually I’d like to get the end of session short runs up to a couple of miles, and the weekend long run up to 10k+. Once I’m at that point I’ll then look at increasing the pace a little from the fairly slow paces I am currently running at.

Isn’t it strange how one good or bad session can make or break for confidence of what sort of shape you’re in? Today’s was one of those sessions. These ‘inbetweeen’ sessions are always a hard one to judge – faster than 5k pace, but not as fast as 2k pace, therefore not a pace that we’d often train at. I really do find that mixing up the training gets me the best results with slower distance work, fast hard sprints, and everything inbetween. This was a session done by a couple of close rivals last week, so a good one to judge my current form on. I decided on a strong pacing plan with 4 solid reps, and a 5th flat out rep. The pacing plan was spot on, with all but the 4th rep exactly 0.1 under the target split.

And the session felt good from start to finish. The problem with training at lunchtime at work is cooling down afterwards though. I don’t mean the cool down in the gym (for which I did another short treadmill run, continuing the plan of running between 1km and 1mile after every gym erg session, and some stretching) – I mean physically lowering my body temperature so I stop sweating. I’m not sure this happened throughout the afternoon at work despite having the window open next to my desk, and the fan on my desk blowing all the time I was sitting there.

Erging must be one of the only sports where you look forward to cooler days (generally I prefer the long sunny days), and also where people don’t mind getting older to move up to the next age category for racing!

As the traffic was so heavy in Farnborough yesterday getting to the gym (due to the Farnborough airshow public days this weekend) I decided to go on my bike this morning. Sunday is normally a rest day, so I just kept it fairly short and went for the longer run that I had planned yesterday.

I kept the run just to the level where I started to feel fatigue in my legs, being my first longer run in this current training cycle. I will continue this routine of doing a short run at the end of each gym erg session (around a mile or so), and one longer run at the weekend (building up to 10k).

Then another 1mile treadmill run as the cool down, followed by 20mins on the ski / step machine (a stepper with lateral movement too, I don’t know the proper name for the machine).

This wasn’t actually the planned workout for today, but I had to change plans when I arrived at the gym to find I had forgotten to put any socks in my kit bag, so the planned longer run will have to be put off to tomorrow!

My schedule today only allowed for a fairly short lunchtime training session again, so I combined a steady erg piece with a short treadmill run again. Up to 1mile today (1.61km) on the running still building very slowly to have no effect on the erg training which takes priority. With August approaching for both myself, and many of the people I coach, it is time to transition the training looking towards the British championships in November, and the World championships in February. Watch out for some high performances by Pete Plan Coaching athletes at these competitions – I will try to give some insight into their training and prospects in blog entries leading up to those competitions. I can’t give too much detail of course as that might aid their competitors!

But I decided against it, and did two fairly short training sessions instead.

Session 1, 8am:

I have commented that I seem to have been struggling a bit with the training lately. Motivation is fine, and the training paces aren’t bad in general, I just seem to be missing a gear. So I’m training how I fancy training on the day at the moment and just waiting for that extra gear to reappear. This morning I did a bit of circuit training using a kettle bell, a couple of dumbbells, a step, a bosu ball, a swiss ball, and threw in some press ups and sit ups. I didn’t take note of what I did, but I had fun for about 25mins and was sweating a lot at the end. I then went to the pool for a few lengths to cool off before heading off to “work” for the day.

I say “work” as I then walked the mile or so around the airfield to the entrance for Farnborough airshow and spent the day there. A research day, and a day or lots of walking and a fair bit of time in the sun.

Session 2, 4.30pm:

I walked the mile back to the gym in the afternoon and started off with a slow and steady 30mins on the erg:

30mins = 7862m / 1:54.4 / 23

I then moved on to the treadmill. I am slowly incorporating some running into my training schedule by doing a short treadmill run after each erg session I do at the gym. For the past 2 weeks in every rowing session I’ve done in the gym I have done a short treadmill run afterwards, or between 1 and 1.5km. My aim is to build this very gradually so that it has no effect on the erg training at all. Previously when I’ve tried incorporating running into my training I’ll do either a few hard 5k’s, or one hard 10k, find it affects a few erg sessions after, and stop completely again. We will see how long this lasts….

I didn’t train on Friday as I woke up with a headache in the early hours of the morning, didn’t sleep too well after that, and still felt tired in the morning. On days like that I don’t take my gym kit when I go to work so that the temptation isn’t there to train later when I know it’s better to rest.

This morning I just put my erg out on the patio and went for a fairly low effort 10k. It felt good to I decided early in the row that rather than do a 1sec reduction in pace for each 2k I would try to push the final 2k to a sub7. From 2k to go it was flat paced at 1:44/1:45 right through to the end, which felt good and powerful at r24. All in all an enjoyable Saturday morning row.